Michael Levin

And if you say to me, I care in the linear range, I actively not, I'm not just saying that I can actively care in the linear range about all the living beings on this planet.

I'm going to say, well, you're not a standard human.

You must be something else because humans, I don't know these standard humans today.

I don't think can do that.

You, you must be some kind of a bodhisattva or some other thing that has these massive cognitive icons.

So I think what's scaling from zero, and I do think it goes all the way down.

I think we can talk about, um,

Even even particles doing something like this.

I think what scales is the size of the cognitive icon.

And so now this is an interesting here.

I'll try for a definition of life or whatever, for whatever it's worth.

I spent no time trying to make that stick.

But if we wanted to, I think we call things alive to the extent that.

the cognitive light cone of that thing is bigger than that of its parts.

So in other words, rocks aren't very exciting because the things it knows how to do are the things that its parts already know how to do, which is follow gradients and things like that.

But living things are amazing at aligning their competent parts so that the collective has a larger cognitive light cone than the parts.

I'll give you a very simple example that comes up in biology and that comes up in our cancer program all the time.

Individual cells have little tiny cognitive light cones.

What are their goals?

Well, they're trying to manage pH, metabolic state, some other things.